December 4, 2005

[M]any impotent men have chosen not to take the drugs, even though the drugs work about 70 percent of the time and have relatively few side effects....

While the drugs have helped millions, many impotent men have simply decided not to take medicine to improve their ability to have sex, said Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, associate clinical professor of urology at Harvard Medical School.

"The idea that every man with erectile dysfunction is going to want to take one of these pills - I think that's not accurate," Dr. Morgentaler said. "And I don't think there's anything wrong with that."...

Younger men who take the drugs are often disappointed because the medicines do not stimulate sexual desire, said Ian Kerner, a sex therapist in New York City. Instead, the drugs work in men who are already aroused but are physically unable to sustain an erection because they have poor blood flow to the penis.

What if Viagra wasn't a pharmaceutical? What if it was just discovered you could get a Viagra woodie from eating the palatable leaf of a certain willow tree? Does that change the calculus of moral judgment involved in finding one's way back to his natural body?

What might be interesting is to see if the statistics given take into effect foreign sales of the drugs reshipped back into the U.S. via Internet pharmacies.

Why bother with dealing with a real M.D., and all that entails, when you can go online and get any of these drugs fairly easily?

I guess I would also like to see if sales controlled by age have changed. As one poster commented, at least in the past, the drugs have been used by younger men to enhance their endurance. I have seen multiple references (don't know how accurate though) of some gay men combining, say, viagra, with meth for extended marathons of sex. Probably happens in the straight world too.

A psychiatrist friend commented on the sales of these drugs, "Shows there's a lot of people out there who don't like each other." Many people have their idea of male desire informed by teenagers, but in fact it is actually fairly fragile - a lesson Camille Paglia has offered those women who are willing to hear it (and haven't noticed it for themselves). The premise of Amis' savagely funny novel, "Jake's Thing," is that the narrator is offered the chance to regain his potency and his regular relations with women, and he'd prefer not to.